Dr Jake Scott has a very useful constitutional reminder in CAPX.
Tony Blair’s bad laws have broken Britain
- Rather than scrap laws which aren't working, we just replace them with worse ones
- Donald Trump has torn up the US political playbook – we can learn from him
- The UK needs a 'Great Restoration Bill'
There’s a bad habit in British politics: rather than fix bad laws, we make worse ones.
This week, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner announced her intention to establish a ‘council on Islamophobia’, that would ‘provide advice to ministers on tackling Islamophobia’. This law is almost a direct product of the 2010 Equality Act, which made the unforgivable mistake of submitting our equal legal standing as British citizens to the legal sanctification of identity.
In turn, as they always do, when these identities clash, rather than re-asserting the legal equality provided for by the historic British constitution, the choice has been made to resolve this bad law with an even worse one. A bad law, it must be remembered, designed to fix the other bad laws of the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act, the 1976 Race Relations Act and so on.
The whole piece is well worth reading because the UK has spent decades enmeshed in a political culture of new laws and new regulations which benefit nobody but the Blob. Particularly useful is Dr Scott's reference to this as a 'bad habit in British politics'.
It is a bad political habit, easily observed all over the place. "They should ban" culture is just one aspect of it, endless fiddling with petty rules and regulations is another, wanting to be submerged in the EU yet another. It's influence is vast and so destructive that the habit must be broken before we are.
6 comments:
A family friend on the fringes of Edinburgh’s legal world told us that, when Blair and Brown took over in 1997, they shipped in numerous cronies from Scotland and parachuted them into positions of power within Labour’s administration, including drafting legislation.
Unfortunately these new lawmakers inadvertently incorporated numerous elements of Scottish law, which is very different from the law in England, into their work and the resulting hotch-potch has been creating legal difficulties and inconsistencies ever since.
A law piled upon a previous law, piled upon a previous law... an endless source of fees for legal professionals perhaps?
Macheath - interesting, it sounds like a good example of general problem where incoming politicians bring in cronies because they trust and think they know them. A very difficult issue to tackle politically without leaders who are more pragmatic and don't do that kind of thing.
DJ - and endless opportunities for bureaucrats to extend their remit, staff and budgets.
The really stupid thing is that the politicians think that passing a law will stop people thinking and expressing their distaste of Islam .
They should learn the lesson of the senior officers in the Falklands who tried to stop the squaddies from calling the islanders "Bennies" after the slow character in "Crossroads" After a while they found the troops calling them "Stills" On asking why, they were told that it was because they still found the Islanders "slow'" like Benny.
I zipped off on an overseas jaunt the year before the insane voting in of Blair/Brown. Coming back at the end of the Brown horror … it was a different society … the contrast all the more stark for the time away. With the net, I at least was up with the ongoing horror, vastly worse than Kinnock threatened to be.
John - I agree, and those opinions will be passed on to friends and family in one way or another, via slang, cartoons, jokes, innuendo and so on.
James - I'm almost pleased I never had that experienced, the ability to look back is bad enough. Young people with transferrable skills should at least think about emigrating.
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